Results

A media researcher was interested in the effect of television programmes on domestic life. She hypothesized that through ‘learning by watching’, certain programmes encourage people to behave like the characters within them. She exposed 54 couples to three popular TV shows, after which the couple were left alone in the room for an hour. The experimenter measured the number of times the couple argued. Each couple viewed all TV shows but at different points in time (a week apart) and in a counterbalanced order. The TV shows were EastEnders (a UK TV show which portrays the lives of extremely miserable, argumentative, London folk who spend their lives assaulting each other, lying and cheating), Friends (which portrays unrealistically considerate and nice people who love each other oh so very much—but I love it anyway), and a National Geographic programme about whales (this was a control). Test the hypothesis with Friedman’s ANOVA.

Repeated Measures ANOVA

Within Subjects Effects
Cases Sum of Squares df Mean Square F p ω²
Series 178.531 2 89.265 10.144 < .001 0.089
Residuals 932.802 106 8.800  
Note.  Type III Sum of Squares
Between Subjects Effects
Cases Sum of Squares df Mean Square F p
Residuals 680.420 53 12.838  
Note.  Type III Sum of Squares

Descriptives

Raincloud plots

Number of Arguments

Nonparametrics

The number of arguments that couples had was significantly affected by the programme they had just watched,  (2) = 7.59, p = .023. Pairwise comparisons with Holm adjusted p-values showed that watching East Enders significantly increased the number of arguments compared to watching Friends (pholm = .025) with a substantial effect with (rrb = 0.61). There was no significant difference in number of arguments when watching Friends compared to the control programme Whales (pholm = 1.000), with a small effect with (rrb = -0.11). Finally, East Enders did not significantly increase the number of arguments compared to watching Whales (pholm = .11), with a medium effect size (rrb = 0.46).
Friedman Test
Factor Χ²F df p Kendall's W
Series 7.586 2 0.023 0.070

Conover Test

Conover's Post Hoc Comparisons - Series
    T-Stat df Wi Wj rrb p pbonf pholm
Eastenders Friends 2.685 106 123.500 97.500 0.609 0.008 0.025 0.025
  Whales 2.117 106 123.500 103.000 0.460 0.037 0.110 0.073
Friends Whales 0.568 106 97.500 103.000 -0.107 0.571 1.000 0.571
Note.  Grouped by subject.
Note.  Rank-biserial correlation based on individual signed-rank tests.